Steven Cohen's trading results

[Mike805]

Quote from Hydroblunt:

You're hilarious. You want to see real big NYSE winners, take a look at WLT, OS, MT etc. Over 300% yearly returns. Take a look through the pink sheet/bulletin board winners if you want to see serious returns. IPS, MON oh please.
Just forget it, you're completely missing the point. You look after the fact, only newbies do that. So if you got into MON exactly a year ago, you would not have been chopped out? Stock went from 35 to almost 30? Oh ok, so you take a 5 point stop loss. Hmm ok so from 35 to 60 makes only 5 wrong trades. Throw in slippage and some unexpected news and there you go. You act as if all your entries into the right stocks will be so perfect that you can easily sit through with a tight stop loss. You also act as if your exits will be near the top. Oh yeah, let's not forget that capital is NEVER tied up while you are sitting in the wrong stocks before you get stopped out. Get real.
Your threads from a year ago are enough to see how much of a great swing trader you really are. Do yourself a favor, sit to some big traders and take note of their losses & their swings. High reward requires high risk, otherwise it would just be too easy. Read some Soros, he mentions on several occasions that to make it big as a speculator you have to take heavy risks. Can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Strict small losses is the rule of consistent day to day scalpers looking for a steady living & grinding it out. Even then, the losses & commissions can eat you up, just like the numerous newbies that get eaten up by prop firms while generating nonstop revenues.

Hydro,

I remember you gave me some grief a while back when I posted a trade on this forum for a long on NMTI. I went into the red on that trade right off the bat and it then it bounced back within a few days to my entry.I doubled my size at my entry and then added 1k shares more on the uptrend.

I got out with an okay profit and you brought up risk to reward and said that my ratio was not good, i.e. I was basically risking 1point to make 50 cents and this was in your words "stupid".

That was not the case if you define monetary risk. I actually went -2k on that trade and came out with a 2.5k profit using some position sizing. That is an okay (slightly positive) R/R for a poor trade I took.

My point is, I'm not sure if you understood the true risk. Price risk and personal capital risk are not the same. You keep thinking in terms of price risk when Cohen, from what I gather uses dynamic risk. He allocates a certain amount to a certain price and has no problem adding to that amount.

My point is that the risk associated with an inital 1k entry at $25/share is not the same risk as having accumulated 5k shares on the stock's path to $30/share. I'll argue that under proper management the risk in the latter case is lesser.

Mike

 

[Hydroblunt]

Quote from Mike805:

Hydro,

I remember you gave me some grief a while back when I posted a trade on this forum for a long on NMTI. I went into the red on that trade right off the bat and it then it bounced back within a few days to my entry.I doubled my size at my entry and then added 1k shares more on the uptrend.

I didnt give you grief, you asked for opinions and I gave you one with which you actually agreed. It was a great pick just your entry was hasty and your exit too early considering how much downside you were willing to take.

I got out with an okay profit and you brought up risk to reward and said that my ratio was not good, i.e. I was basically risking 1point to make 50 cents and this was in your words "stupid".

That was not the case if you define monetary risk. I actually went -2k on that trade and came out with a 2.5k profit using some position sizing. That is an okay (slightly positive) R/R for a poor trade I took.

All you have to do is ask yourself where your downside exit was. What if you had doubled up and the price went right back down. Where would you have gotten out? Remember how the stock gapped down to 4.50 just to shake everyone. You know the details better than me obviously but I just remember you getting out with 50 cents but holding the position down against you 1 point. You did modify your trade by adding more so it came out right and Im guessing you were not willing to wait for a 1 point downside again.

My point is, I'm not sure if you understood the true risk. Price risk and personal capital risk are not the same. You keep thinking in terms of price risk when Cohen, from what I gather uses dynamic risk. He allocates a certain amount to a certain price and has no problem adding to that amount.

My point is that the risk associated with an inital 1k entry at $25/share is not the same risk as having accumulated 5k shares on the stock's path to $30/share. I'll argue that under proper management the risk in the latter case is lesser.

Yes I do think in price terms because that is essentially how the stocks move.

You have to monitor and adjust your risk accordingly and the best trades will very rarely come easy with small stop losses. But if you are taking in 5k shares of a stock on its way to $30 and you KNOW it's gonna explode well what if the stock goes to retrace back to $25 just to shake the weak hands? You're gonna keep jumping in and out?
I still remember what OS used to pull off last summer, no small losses mentality would have allowed you to sit through. Yet the future gain was almost obvious.

I think it's silly to summarize Cohen's success on such a simply idiom. I'm sure he shifts his bets appropriately. Just observe any serious big traders and you will see that the small losses everytime rule does not cut it. It gets a lot more complex than that.

 

[murray t turtle]

Quote from wilburbear:

I am not Jewish. But my wife is. In deciding where our children should go to school, we looked at a Jewish elementary school. Kids had just dropped down, and were sitting, reading to each other in the hallway, as if they couldn't wait to share some new information. That was the last school we had to look at. My kids have been there ever since.

===============
That 's a good deal;
many areas in US have amazing % illiteracy.

Not to take anything thing from hebrew-Christian education or Goldstein marketing; love for reading may have been caused by a teacher who loved reading or parent who love reading, or all of those groups. Wilburbear happy moms day to the childrens MOM and other moms!!!

Watch this pattern , Bill Gates dropped out of college to work MSFT;
but Steve Cohen told Jack Schwager something very practical [%%%]he learned @ Wharton.

This may sound like a teenage joke but it is not.
Not to long out of school worked for mr Goldstein, and the Goldstein family hired me to help in a small way to move slowly;

coal
corn,
occasional oats, but would rather buy Quaker or generic oats@Kroger or Save -a-Lot Stores
soybeans
scrap steel
& if you worked long enough- stock help/profit sharing.

Not to take away from Steve Cohen Wharton wisdom;
but still like reading Mark Weinstein, and Mark experiences with real estate,
occasional options,
stocks.

 

[candletrader]

Quote from nitro:


I also believe it to be true of many Asians. I don't think it is any secret to the factors composing the success - a high esteem is placed on higher education by both groups with a respect for intellectual pursuits, along with a proper work ethic and no hangups about getting paid well to do your job.

nitro

Yes, Jews and Asians are highly successful financially and professionally because there share such traits in a way which is not so prevalent amongst other races...

 

[jem]

I really do think if you did a regression analysis (or whatever they call it these days) you might find that race or Jewishness is not really the key factor)

For instance last time I looked at this stuff which was a long time ago.

Wealth and family income in the United States broke down pretty clearly on the average age of the bread winners.

For instance Jews were the oldest and had the most money followed some other group and then I was proud to see Americans of Irish decent were third at the time.

But it was not such a big deal because we were also the 3 or fourth oldest.

 

[nitro]

Quote from jem:

I really do think if you did a regression analysis (or whatever they call it these days) you might find that race or Jewishness is not really the key factor)

For instance last time I looked at this stuff which was a long time ago.

Wealth and family income in the United States broke down pretty clearly on the average age of the bread winners.

For instance Jews were the oldest and had the most money followed some other group and then I was proud to see Americans of Irish decent were third at the time.

But it was not such a big deal because we were also the 3 or fourth oldest.

The problem with your analysis is that does not take into consideration of the accumulation of wealth by inheritance (or known future inheritance) and how it affects not only your present actions, but those in the future. Nor does your analysis take into consideration the capacity to take greater risk when you can always fall back on money you did not make, both for psychological reasons and simple economic one. Inherited money changes _everything_.

If gains are truly proportional to risk as stated in Modern Portfolio Theories, then it is no wonder that those that can take an innordinate amount of risk tend to do better on average. And those that don't make it at least get put into the average bin (you risked only a portion of your inheritance,) whereas if you don't start with a nest egg and you don't make it, you get not only put in the poor bin, but the poor house.

You are thinking only of kinetic energy and have forgotten to consider potential energy.

Further, if the only measure of success is how much money you make, but you also don't take into consideration how much free time you have (money = stored free-time energy, which by the way "leisure time" is component of scientific achievement) or whether you are your own boss or not (freedom of creativity, less menial work, etc) your numbers are single dimensional and the people you analyse look like lines.

Think about it.

Besides, who said anything about money? What about the results from "scientific" achievements?

nitro

 

[NYSEscalpa]

Wow, nice to see another thread go off on a random tangent........

 

[jem]

I was not taking a stand for anything. I was just saying when looking at the data if you subtract out age and geography, it is tough to draw any conclusions.

And by the way I look at modern portfolio theory with a very jaundiced eye. (It has been discredited since I was exposed to it in the 80s.)

I do not think big gains come from big risk necessarily. Big gains come from big info, big access, big friends and big ideas.

Not many people with big money take big risk. It is sort of the rule of big money to let others take the risk.

Markets are set up for insiders to tranfer risk to the public and get transaction fees in the process.

Most of the big money I know came from big companies. Big companies got big many different ways. But most of the time it was not by betting the farm as a big company.

 

[nitro]

Quote from jem:

I was not taking a stand for anything. I was just saying when looking at the data if you subtract out age and geography, it is tough to draw any conclusions.

And by the way I look at modern portfolio theory with a very jaundiced eye. (It has been discredited since I was exposed to it in the 80s.)

I do not think big gains come from big risk necessarily. Big gains come from big info, big access, big friends and big ideas.

Not many people with big money take big risk. It is sort of the rule of big money to let others take the risk.

There is lots to disagree with here, but I will choose only the statement below since I want to go and spend some time with my daughter:

... I was just saying when looking at the data if you subtract out age and geography, it is tough to draw any conclusions...

I suggest you run not walk to your bookstore of choice and read:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-4052454-6435822?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

nitro

 

[Trend Fader]

Quote from NYSEscalpa:

Wow, nice to see another thread go off on a random tangent........

Goes to show u the quality of ET>... people dont really talk about trading anymore.. they take a good topic thread and change it to history class.

I thought i was talking to traders not wanna be professors.

--MIKE